Английски език I, ден А

Thucydides

Rachel Gould

It is a seventeen-year-old talking. So it seems rather chatty. We are to have everything explained. She wants to be a writer. But then, she says quite early on: 'Like Thucytlides, I shall leave something out. It's always more interesting, don't you think, when a writer leaves something out?'

Rachel Gould is a young journalist. She has worked for Vogue and contributed to The Times and the Guardian. She is now making a name for herself as a writer of short stories.

I expect you'd have mitched off school if you'd have been doing Thucydides. You thought nobody did Greek any more, I suppose? Well, when I was doing my A-levels1, some people still did: two of us, to be precise, and Thucydides was what we started on. I don't know how much you know about Thucydides. I had a love-hate relationship with him (that's a cliché, I know, and perhaps I'll cut it out later, but at the moment I'm just trying to tell you the story). The Penguin translation I was using as a crib had something in the introduction about his style being obscure. He certainly was hell-ishly difficult at times. If he'd been alive today, he'd have been the sort of man — an academic probably — who speaks in inordinately long sentences, and who forgets half-way through quite what the structure of his sentence is, so that it ends in a way which is totally contradictory to the beginning. All very well, you might think? Yes, but he wasn't speaking, he was writing, so why didn't he correct himself afterwards? I never quite figured it out.

But on the other hand he was a fascinating man. I don't know whether you've seen Edward VI's diary in the British Museum, the one who was Elizabeth's brother — I think he was sixteen when he died? Well, it's full of figures, statistics I mean: lists of all the cargoes coming into London with all the details of the number of barrels of salt fish and ballast and the tonnage of each vessel. He obviously had a passion far detail. I'm telling you this because Thucydides was the same. When you read about the battles in his War, you always knew how many people were on each side, how many were cavalry and how many hoplites2, and what sort of shields they had, so you could have made a film about it, there was so much information. If he could find out the exact details from people who were in the battle, he gave them to you. And if he couldn't find out exactly, he made them up, so they would fit in. I don't think that matters, do you? (Some people did. They said this was history, and history shouldn't be made up. But I had a good answer to that: that the Greek for history is the same as the Greek for story, which is true.) And then, if you're a girl — I am, and I never wanted to be — it's useful to find out how you stake a harbour-bottom to sabotage an incoming enemy fleet, and things of that sort. I became very interested in military tactics. Thucydides was a general himself at the beginning of the war, so you know he gets things right. Later on he was disgraced in some strange way which he never makes clear, and was exiled from Athens — that's one of the few details he doesn't give you.

So that's why I liked and didn't like Thucydides.
 
I don't think the problems started in my first A-level year. I worked very hard — of course I was doing other subjects as well as Greek. In the evenings after I came back from school we had tea and watched some television and then I went up to my room. I don't remember working on my other subjects, but I remember Thucydides. I had my book case on my left, opposite the bed, and my desk — only a table, really — next to that, with my volume of Thucydides and a vocabulary book and the two huge volumes of the Liddell and Scott dictionary. I worked slowly. At the beginning I was prepared to gloss over difficulties. I knew there was a lot I didn't really understand, and my vocabulary was small, and sometimes I had to look up almost every word in a sentence. But as I got better, I became more perfectionist. I would worry over a sentence for minutes, half an hour perhaps, until I not only understood the gist of what he was saying, but the relationship, grammatically, of every word to every other word in the sentence. And that was difficult, because Thucydides was so obscure, as I said before. Sometimes my father offered to help me, but I refused. He taught classics at the University, he was clever and a patient teacher, but I wanted to convince myself that I could cope with Greek on my own, without help.

So that was how the first year went. It was in the second year that things started going wrong. Not right at the beginning of the year, I think, but after a time I'd got myself into a hell of a mess. I had boy problems too, but I won't go into details over that. Like Thucydides I shall leave something out. It's always more interesting, don't you think, when a writer leaves something out? You can mull it over and wonder, and then it gives the critics a chance to have their different interpretations. Anyway, somehow I stopped working. It happened like this. One day, I hadn't had time to prepare any Greek. I felt guilty, and I didn't go to my class. Then the next class, I felt even guiltier — not only had I not prepared my Greek, but I hadn't gone to the previous class, and those two things together were harder to explain than either of them separately. So I didn't go to that class either. And so it went on, until it had escalated to such a point that I had to avoid my classics teacher in the school assembly hall, in the corridors, everywhere. So then I had to mitch off school. Perhaps it’s not called mitching where you live, but that’s what it’s called in Swansea. It means staying away from school without having a letter from your parents to say that you were ill, or had to go to the dentist, or were looking so pale that your mother thought you surely would be ill; if she insisted on your taking that horrid long bus journey. I just mitched.

Perhaps I should have mentioned before that I lived in Swansea, but it's not really central to the story. Suffice it to say that it's where Dylan Thomas3 went to school — you probably know that. But now I'd better give a brief description of where we lived, because that will explain a few things. You probably think that descriptions are boring. I do too, but you see, I want to be a writer later on, and writers always give descriptions at some point in the narrative, and so I think I should  practise, and you'll have to bear with me.

When we came to Swansea, we looked at all sorts of different houses old ones in the old parts, ones near the University and ones out beyond the Mumbles on Gower Peninsula, but what we chose was a hole in the ground. I mean that literally. By the time we came to move, the house was more or less finished, but when we first went to look at the site it was just a hole with a bulldozer in it amongst lots of other holes. So why did we choose it? Because of the view. If I were Tolstoy I could wax lyrical about that view. The house was almost at the brow of a hill which led on to a wild, marshy patch of common land where sometimes, in the very early morning, you saw foxes, and then to a golf course. The other way, towards the south, it looked over Swansea bay to the crooked Mumbles peninsula with its lighthouse and the coast of Devon beyond, arid on the other side out towards the enormous Port Talbot oil refinery which grew plumes of smoke in the day time, and brilliant orange flames in the night, burning off the waste gases. It wasn't a view you would call sublime, I suppose, but it had something of everything, and it was never boring to look at. The sea was the best thing. In towns you tell the weather and the seasons by the greenness of plants and the times that flowers grow. But in Swansea you told the weather from the mood of the sea as well. The sea is more extreme. Sometimes an intense blueness with tiny foam-caps to each wave, but sometimes a thick angry oily grey, and enormous waves breaking over the sea wall at Mumbles and flooding the fishermen's cottages. I didn't realize how much I loved the sea until I left.
 
Then down the street and round the corner from the house was the park. It had been the grounds of a large house at the bottom of the park which now belonged to the University. It was a strange park, a bit fantastical. The people from the house must have had a good head-gardener, a man with a bizarre imagination. At the top, nearest our house, was an area of dogs' graves, about ten of them, all labelled with their names and dates, with daffodils and violets growing round them in the spring. Then there was a long wide sweep of grass that ran straight down the hill to the sea road. On one side was the big house, on the other a wood, and beyond that an area with a curious winding stream planted thickly with rhodo-dendrons that grew luscious jungle flowers of red and white and dark pink. In one place there was a folly, and in another a sort of Chinese pagoda with a Chinese bridge crossing a pond covered with water lilies. Nothing could have been more incongruous in a park in Swansea, and it was one of my favourite places.

I said that this description was going to help you understand how things happened, and this is why. Every morning we walked through that park down the grass slope to the sea road where we waited for the bus to school. We is myself and my brothers and sister. I forgot to tell you until now that I had any brothers or sisters — it didn't seem necessary because this story is really about me, and a little about my father. But I just wanted you to know that I wasn't an only child, in case you thought in that ridiculous Freudian way that it was because I was an only child that I worked so hard and let the work get on top of me and then had to mitch off school. So usually we walked together and caught the bus together, but sometimes one or other of us went early, to play football before school started, or copy someone's homework if we hadn't had time to do it the night before, or it had been too difficult. When I got into this dreadful muddle at school it didn't seem odd to any of them that I started getting up a bit earlier and going off to catch an earlier bus. In fact, that isn't what I was doing. I walked down to the park gates, turned right just inside the fence and walked to the Chinese pagoda. If it was sunny I sat on the steps leading down to the pool, and if it was raining I sat inside the pagoda. Sometimes I spent the whole morning there reading. You mustn't think that I was lazy, and that that was why I mitched. It was just that Thucydides was so obscure. I said just now that I want to be a writer, and probably already then I had an idea that that was what I wanted to be, so I read voraciously, especially poetry. But if it was very cold, I couldn't bear a whole morning in the pagoda, and I timed on my watch, carefully, the times when everyone should have left the house my brothers and sister to my school, my mother to the junior school where she taught, and my father to the University, plus half an hour for all eventualities (the car breaking down, or someone oversleeping). Then I went back up through the park to the house, let myself in and spent the rest of the day in comfort in my room.

Well, this is where we get to the main point of the story, where you will see how indirectly Thucydides was the cause of my discovering something awful. If he hadn't made his Peloponnesian War so difficult to read, I don't suppose I ever would have discovered, and if I hadn't discovered I probably would not have done a lot of things I did afterwards. Because the discovery made me change my views about a great many things. If you were going to be Freudian about things, you would probably say that it caused my transition from puberty to adulthood. And everyone knows how painful that transition is.

It was late spring by this time, but in Swansea the spring, instead of bringing the first fine weather and being the harbinger of summer, was often the beginning of a rainy season that I sometimes thought couldn't be much worse than the monsoons. As the alarm went off in the morning you were immediately aware of the constant sound of water, falling from the sky, pouring down the gutters and the drains and in streams down the road. The lawns in front and behind the house were water-logged, the trees sprouted moulds on their trunks, and in the park it was difficult to avoid the slugs; there were so many. On this particular morning the rain was so heavy I considered not leaving the house at all, but that would have been dangerous, and I got myself up and to the park in the end.

I don't know why, but when I got back to the house, my father's car was still in the drive. Perhaps I hadn't allowed the full extra half an hour; it was so wet and I was so cold. The only thing to do was to wait in the garage until he left, and that's what I did. It was a case of making the best of a bad job. Some people's garages are so neat you could quite happily live in them, but ours wasn't one of those. The old book case of my grandfather's, with its jam-jars full of rusting nails and screws, tins of oil and coils of fuse-wire, was the neatest thing in it. The rest was a chaotic jumble — the lawn-mower and the step-ladder, tools and a flat tyre — and there was hardly enough light coming through the one low window to read by. So I simply sat, listening to the rushing rain, and through that for the scraping of the front door against the metal door-sill, which would signal my father's departure. After almost half an hour the rain seemed to ease off a little, and then the door scraped and I heard the clicking of my father's shoes — he had recently taken to wearing a pair of old-fashioned black lace-up shoes, with metal half-moons at the back of the heel to stop them wearing down. But then as I stood up and tried to rub the pins and needles out of my legs, I thought I heard other footsteps. I probably wouldn't have been sure — the rain was still swirling down the gutters — but then I heard  voices. One was my father's; the other a woman's voice, not my mother's.

`Get in,' he said. `I'll drive you to the bus-stop.'

`Couldn't you take me all the way? I've got a class at eleven and the weather's filthy.'

`Sorry. We might be seen. You really shouldn't have come here either. It was a stupid thing to do.'

`I had to. I was miserable after yesterday evening and I thought you might . .

Her voice trailed off, the doors slammed, and after some damp rumblings the engine started up and the car reversed up the drive and then down the hill. The quietness of the rain flowed slowly back and I stared blankly at the rust on the back of the garage door. I thought of my mother starting on the third lesson of the day on the other side of the town.

It was at the end of that week that the school telephoned my parents to tell them that I hadn't been to school for some weeks. I must have suspected that things were coming to a head. I had gone to bed with a slight temperature and the beginnings of a cold, a real one, but one which stemmed not so much from sitting in the damp garage as from my state of mind, which was as dismal as the weather. My parents came up separately to talk to me. My mother remonstrated quietly, and my father lectured me slightly. I cried. He thought I was crying about Thucydides, in repentance for the work I hadn't done. But I was crying about him. I was seeing things in a different perspective, and Thucydides didn't seem so much of a problem as he had before.